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I write a simple computer program that randomly selects one of two outcomes. I send out letters telling people I can pick stocks and shares that will go up. About 50% of the people I write to think I know what I’m doing and think they might buy subscriptions to my stock picking service.

I do the same thing with the 50% that got the right answer, each time making an ever smaller group think I’m a stock picking genius.

Eventually I will run out of people, but right up to the last two it will appear to them that I really knew what I was doing, when I was effectively tossing a coin.

In the mean time quite a few of them may have subscribed to my stock picking service. Good for me, not so much for them.

The people at the end of this chain of probabilities will think that they are kings of the world, when they are only survivors of a simple process that could have picked anyone from the original group of stock buyers.

I recently attended a virtual course on complexity and discovered the fun simulation language Net Logo. For historical reasons the little actors displayed on the screen are called turtles. I could just as easily build a program that has a population that halves every turn. Is the lone turtle left blinking on the screen at the end a special turtle, did it somehow avoid the grim reaper against the odds? No, obviously not.

If that turtle was instead a person? The story it had to tell would be a story the rest of us would want to emulate because it was a survivor. This is why the biographies of the heroic entrepreneurs are often not that surprising. This is why their opinions quite often don’t differ a lot from those of others in the same cohort.

I used to work for Oracle and read the unauthorised biography of Larry Ellison – it’s an entertaining read and certainly not very complimentary. One of the things that comes through is luck, Oracle came close to going over several times, literally so close that a single large order from Japan saved it. I was talking about Richard Branson with someone recently. If I remember it right he originally had the idea of opening his record stores near tube stations late at night so people travelling home could buy records, he also had an aunt who lent him the money to open these stores. Great idea, but he didn’t have to go to a bank and get laughed at. Again, when Steve Jobs early Apple got some venture capital so they could make things happen – whoa, things started happening! (Thanks to Tim Spencer for this one).

There is an unknown population of other people and businesses that didn’t make the cut, or that stayed small service companies that are still around but not mega corporations. Probably 99.99% of them. Jobs himself acknowledged this with the famous analogy that the things joining the dots together are only apparent when you look back and make a story of them. In my last post I talked about pareidolia, which is the human tendency to invent patterns where none exist. We can all find stories up like this; if I hadn’t answered a job advert in the Independent I wouldn’t have met my wife, my kids wouldn’t exist and, like, wow man (sarcasm off). We make a causal chain of events but forget the massive part that chance plays in what happens to us. If the University had placed the ad in a different paper on a different day, who knows?

Survivor bias makes the winners’ stories compelling, but there are another 9999 (or many more) stories of other people we never hear. Remember this, next time someone tells you that you must emulate this or that hero of theirs. Success needs an element of luck, and the same person may not be lucky twice. Napoleon used to ask of a general is he lucky? He was no fool. We all love 37 signals’ (now Bascamps’) story, but there was luck there. Lots of people have tried their formula without getting what they have, or even losing everything.

This isn’t meant to sound like a doom and gloom principle, far from it, what it is saying is you need to find your own way that works for you. You also need to take that opportunity when it falls into your lap and do something with it. But you aren’t any more special than anyone else. It doesn’t matter. What matters is being clear about what you want and sticking to it.